Back Flash: Mikhail Zoshchenko
(cake by Lukka Sigurdardottir)
Words by Mikhail Zoshchenko.
He liked to yap out, “This is not theatre!”
He had a bird he named Dog.
His writing often deadpan. We know why people write deadpan (E.L Doctorow to Dashiell Hammet to, oh hell, Tao Lin)–they are saying what they are saying and are not. A deadpan is an iron skillet. The flavor is “cured” in the core. Like a bowl of bacon or a jelly intruder. [But now I am getting hungry.]
He saw that flash fiction (“snapshots” his term) was disreputable to the bourgeoisie. (At the time, they felt the genre unfit for critical analysis, so unfit, period.) This glowed Zoshchenko to the form. The bourgeoisie lived as if life was theatre. Worms under teacups, something.
So fuck them.